iulie 31, 2011

Hardly a mystic

He came to despise the idea that literature is a criticism of life in the sense that the literary faculty occupies a high place apart, from which it can sit in judgment upon the life that produced it. His distrust of the conscious intelligence as infallible guide to truth had the same base. The thing produced could not be the judge of its producer. Instead, he came to see literature and all art as the interpreter of meaning, as the translator of the truth about existence and purpose: a revelation. And he thought that this revelation came from another and deeper activity of the psyche than the rational intelligence, which continually missed the point, the reality.